The Bank of England has instructed the software coders to 'hard-bake' identity features into the digital currency.
The central bank has entrusted Nuggets, a digital payments platform, with the task of "incorporating identity features into the digital pound", according to Nuggets CEO Alastair Johnson.
The technology, Johnson explains, could facilitate not only the verification of age for purchasing age-restricted items like alcohol and cigarettes, but also citizenship status.
This, he goes on to say, 'could open new avenues for the Bank of England to persuade the general public to use the digital currency, an aspect of a larger global trend of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).'
The technology is exactly what those dubbed 'conspiracy theorists' have been warning since CBDCs first emerged. The government are effectively creating programmable money and will pre-programme that money to only be spent on commodities the government state. The technology will fundamentally change the relationship it has with the public and the relationship the public has with money.
The integration of such potentially invasive features has confirmed everything that so-called 'conspiracy theorists' said all along.
The general public, however, are not being made aware of this known threat to civil liberties. As millions adopt contactless and online payments there is a perception that a CBDC is just another digital currency when the two concepts are entirely different. Digital payments are merely a way of transferring money from one place to another. CBDCs on in contrast, give government total control over your bank account, and therefore your life. It represents an unprecedented threat to everyone's freedom.
The developers claim that the technology 'could limit companies from collecting data from purchases, potentially facilitating micro-payments', Bloomberg reported. These are transactions for minor items, like a single newspaper article, which wouldn’t require a full subscription. Nuggets has stated that this would be achieved through the use of a “self-sovereign decentralized identity,” keeping the digital pound’s infrastructure separate from the individual’s underlying data.
However, this hasn’t put to rest concerns over the potential privacy risks of CBDCs. Experts warn of the vast amount of data that could be gathered from daily transactions, especially given Nuggets’ specialization in decentralized identity systems that regulate how individuals’ data is used with each transaction.
Civil liberty groups maintain that this merely proves what they have been saying all along, that the implementation of a digital pound serve as a Trojan Horse, enabling the monitoring of an individual's transactions, and gives the government control over what you can and can't spend your own money on.
The threat is real, and the 'conspiracy theorists' were right again.
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